The partition of Ireland in 1922 put an end to many centuries of English/British domination over the island. While there had been many cycles of uprisings and repression, the 1916 uprising convinced the British government of granting independence to Ireland.
The presence of a large community of people of English and Scottish origin in the northwestern part of the island led the British government to impose a separation of Ireland into two entities: the Irish Free State, which became the Republic of Ireland in 1949, occupied about four fifths of the island and was predominantly ethnically Irish and Catholic. In the northeast, the Province of Northern Ireland was in majority ethnically British and Protestant, with about one third of Irish Catholic people.
Of the four traditional province of Ireland, Connacht, Munster and Leinster were fully part of Ireland, while six out of nine counties of Ulster formed the new Northern Irish entity. For that reason, Northern Ireland is sometimes referred to as Ulster.
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The Partition of Ireland
